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If the human mind (or some component of it) is able to influence the world around it, it may not matter so much whether the words and formulae have any power as whether someone thinks they do. Especially if they induce an altered state of consciousness (hence all the chanting and stuff).

 

There's more to it than that though:

In the past people didn't think of words as arbitrary symbols but as things that had an intrinsic connection to the things they represented, and therefore having power in themselves. For related reasons writing was considered magical by its nature (the Etruscans certainly seem to have thought of it that way, among others).

Poetry has been considered to have magical power (in a real sense): the right words chosen in the right way could maim or kill. The spell is an attempt to engineer reality: the appropriate formula switches words from describing to generating. In its own way it's a perfectly logical approach  (and no, I don't believe a word of it).

 

As an aside, all those nifty cave paintings suggest our ancestors had a general belief in the ability of symbols to control the things they symbolise.

And of course we still have the phrase "Speak of the Devil", because you know what saying the name does...